Hey, Chime? You can work on your creative writing when the changelog is done.

“We’re updating the segmentation logic of our A/B test infrastructure to downgrade its respect for the CloudFlare score when deciding whether or not to mark a session as coming from a bot. This was skewing the data on several of our start screen UI experiments, particularly within APAC data.”

Sometimes, you really don’t want to hear it ;D

We made our interface SUCK! Can you change it back? NO!

FUCK YOU

This sort of shit ought to be banned.

just trust us bro, no spyware in here, bro.

Ahow many updates receives an app, is now considered a "good" metric somehow now. So now if dependabot pushes a PR, it's a new release on the app stores (of course without testing)

The algorithms on the app stores now consider the app "active" and push the app "up" in ranking

There was a certain billionaire bragging about his app getting 3 vibe-coded updates a day while the competition "only" got 3 a week

So, they can't write a real change log. What can they write? "Dependabot updated leftpad from 1.1.3.2 to 1.1.3.3" "untested: updated Gradle from 8.14.2 to 8.14.3" "200mb update to change a comma in the Hungarian translation"

chime: a PM asked an AI to write this after the only dev that knew how to do this quit

Discord: The PM was frustrated with the devs not summarizing this release crap that no one cares about anyway and hid it behind a link ah that's so much cleaner now.

Instagram: fuck you

Linphone:

I would rather no change log than the LLM generated fall thing… that was a waste of time to read.

changelogs should be legally mandated on app stores

Facebook is one of the worst:

"performance improvements and bug fixes"

Modern mobile app development almost always releases features gradually behind feature flags, so changelogging things is not necessarily practical to do.

• more ads
• more pointless notifications
• taken out that one thing you actually liked and put it behind a paywall

I think a lot of times they don’t want you to know what’s been updated. For instance, pointing out all the bugs you’re fixing might make your app look like it’s always full of bugs. Or the security fix might draw attention to issues that exist for currently outdated apps.

Not saying it’s a good reason, but maybe that’s their thought process.

You expect them to admit:

• Implemented more aggressive collection of personal data to sell to advertisers.

• Advertisers of medical and beauty supplements are now suggested to your teenage daughter if she deleted her picture minutes after not receieving likes.

• Users who advocate for neonazi and genocidal idologies now get suggested to each other to better promote and organize which returns higher profit of targetted advertisements as their usage time and activities increase together.

• As part of our new monitoring and speech policy, users are now allowed to use the word retard, removed, f-word, tranny, and n-word with hard R without their posts getting flagged or reviewed which allows for better targetted advertisements and higher revenue for the Zuck.

• Data collection now includes geophraphical tracking of your friends and intrests of people you follow giving higher revenue for shareholders.

• Implemented analysis of background data collection of users usage and screen time, which gives higher profits per click to our targetted adveretisers.

OMG, thank you! Until now I thought I was the only person to be fucking annoyed by this shit.

I can understand a banking app such as Chime* wanting to obfuscate whatever bugs or potential exploits they’ve come across and patched - to prevent users on older versions from being targeted; but the rest of those examples are utterly bullshit.

I put forward Duolingo as another egregious example of this bullshit:

I 100% agree that proper changelog should be provided, but to defend devs a litte, the play store changelog character limit makes it almost useless for anything but very small changes.

Though doing funny haha in the changelog is so dumb, they should be like "this changelog field can't handle the changes, please see the changelog inside the app"

Hey just due to your mention of Insta thought you might wanna take a look at this

https://www.distractionfreeapps.com/

I've used it for a good while now and really like it but outside of that not an expert in terms of security or features. But it stops the updates, and I can choose to switch off pretty much everything and purely use it as a messaging app.

Because there's a very strict character limit on the Google Play store side for update messages. So if it's a bigger update, all I can do is put a summary of the changelog there.

Also happens with some apps on fdroid. "Update available" - click to see, nothing there

That Chime one is the sloppest AI slop I've seen today.

"Bugfixes and performance improvements"

I see that one all the time from big companies because it sounds nice and tells you nothing.

One of those updates a few years included embedding adware. So, thanks for that... jackhole

The obvious answer is there's no human at the helm recording changes, it's just the next build. You'll take it and you'll like it.

"General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience."

AFAIK discord does it on the app.
But its more convenient if they added it to the changelog.

I asked this on the Motorola sub when i first got my phone and no one gives a shit.

The changelog was always something like "various bugfixes and stability updates". removed, what did you do?

"Fixed errors in the French translation" might only appear in the French change log.

Change logs are kinda hard to do in a CI/CD environment because of the way that development style works.

It's actually pretty challenging in general. Not sure you've ever built a change log before but it's a pretty interesting exercise thats easier said then done. Even open source logs just copy paste the commit log which can be not all that helpful.

Pumpkins and... hay...?